Four hours a week, on the calendar
When building gets cheap, insight is the only edge left.
Yesterday you built something in hours. So can everyone else with the same tools. Two teams with the same stack diverge on one thing only: who understands the customer better.
That makes customer proximity the most defensible skill in the Standard, not the softest one. And it is not a research function you outsource. It is daily oxygen.
Sit in the support queue. Take the awkward early sales call. Watch someone onboard. Read the cancel reasons in raw text, not in a summary. The PM who can tell you what a named customer said last Tuesday beats the one with the better dashboard.
Then write it down where an agent can read it. Notes in your head don't compound. A dated, searchable record of what customers said and what you did about it does.
Today
Block four customer hours a week, recurring: two sales calls, one support shadow, one onboarding shadow. Start one doc where every note gets a name and a date.
Done when: The blocks are on your calendar for the next month and the doc has its first entry.
Get one lesson a day instead
Same lessons, one a day, so the tasks actually happen.